Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 1/6/23:
"Is He Coming Back?"
"We’ve heard from other CEOs that do a return. Who is next? Will it make a difference in the economics of the company? Is AI the future of everything?"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, January 6, 2023
Judge Napolitano, "Scott Ritter, Ceasefire in Ukraine - Is It Real?"
Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 1/6/23:
"Scott Ritter, Ceasefire in Ukraine - Is It Real?"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
TeleTruth, 1/6/23: "Bakhmut Update"
"Russian forces expand advancing from the north and south. Russian Armed Forces continued their offensive along the entire Bakhmut front, developing advances from the north and south, as well as minor advances on the outskirts of the city. Ukrainian troops blew up a bridge on Bakhmutivka river to prevent Russian troops from advancing to the city center. So far, the fierce battle is still ongoing. Russian direct attacks cause Ukraine to suffer colossal losses of both servicemen and military equipment every day."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Times, 1/6/23:
"Russian Choppers Hunt, Drones ‘Sting’ Ukrainian Soldiers"
"The Russian Defense Minister has released two dramatic videos of Ka-52 'Alligator' attack helicopters and Made-In-Russia drones decimating enemy positions in Ukraine. The footage of 'Alligator' in action comes a day after TASS news agency reported that first batch of the upgraded attack helicopters was handed over to the Russian Army."
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“M13 is one of the most prominent and best known globular clusters. Visible with binoculars in the constellation of Hercules, M13 is frequently one of the first objects found by curious sky gazers seeking celestials wonders beyond normal human vision.
M13 is a colossal home to over 100,000 stars, spans over 150 light years across, lies over 20,000 light years distant, and is over 12 billion years old. At the 1974 dedication of Arecibo Observatory, a radio message about Earth was sent in the direction of M13. The featured image in HDR, taken through a small telescope, spans an angular size just larger than a full Moon, whereas the inset image, taken by Hubble Space Telescope, zooms in on the central 0.04 degrees.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160727.htmlChet Raymo,“Examination of Conscience”
“Examination of Conscience”
by Chet Raymo
by Chet Raymo
"I have been reading Stephanie Smallwood's “Saltwater Slavery,” a close examination of the trade in human beings between the coast of West Africa and the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is a sobering read, but if there is one thing I came away with, it was this: We have an enormous capacity to rationalize the most horrendous crimes. Everyone involved in the slave trade - the European owners of the ships, the masters of the trading companies, the ship captains and crews, the plantation owners in the West Indies and the Chesapeake, the African tribal chiefs who captured and sold their neighbors to the European merchants - knew in some part of their souls that what they were doing was wrong. All of them - good Christians among them, pillars of their communities - found ways to rationalize their participation.
Who among us is immune to self deceit? To what extent am I implicated in the horrendous tragedies that are Darfur and Iraq? What do I owe to the global environment? Is there such a thing as innocence when we are so intimately connected that people in Fiji and Japan will read these words only moments after I write them?
What about science, the favored subject of this blog? Here is Smallwood: “The littoral [of the West African coast]...was more than a site of economic exchange and incarceration. The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied upon a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas.”
Even science, like religion and democratic politics, can be pressed into the service of evil. We are all of us to some extent in the grip of economic forces as powerful and sometimes as pernicious as those that drove the saltwater slave trade. Few of us are required to personally face the direst evils. We are saved from moral anguish only by the fact that our acts of commission and omission ripple outward until their consequences are diluted and lost in the general happiness or unhappiness of humankind.”
- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/
The Poet: Mark Strand, "The End"
"When the Sky Is No More Than Remembered Light:
Mark Strand Reads His Poignant Poem 'The End'”
- by Maria Popova
“Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing,
when the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.”
“It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention,” the Pulitzer-winning poet Mark Strand (April 11, 1934–November 29, 2014) observed in contemplating the artist’s task to bear witness to the universe. And yet this universe in which we live is predicated on impermanence, and the lucky accident of our existence is crowned with the certitude of its end from the start. Why, then, are we always so shocked by the finitude of all we hold dear and, above all, by our own mortality? Few are those who can say with sincerity, like Rilke did an exquisite 1923 letter, that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.” Instead, we spend our lives shuddering at any reminder of our inevitable end, unsalved by the miracle of having lived at all.
Montaigne articulated the central paradox of being perfectly in 16th-century meditation on death and the art of living: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” Still, lament we do, and some of our greatest art gives voice to that lamentation.
That paradox is what Strand explores with transcendent courage and curiosity in his poem “The End,” found in his "Collected Poems" (public library) - the trove of truth and beauty that gave us Strand’s love letter to dreams.
In this hauntingly beautiful recording, courtesy of The New York Public Library, an aged Strand reads his poignant poem shortly before he repaid his own debt to mortality:
"The End"
by Mark Strand
"Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end."
Complement with the lyrical "Duck, Death and the Tulip", Marcus Aurelius on mortality and the key to living fully, and the great Zen master Seung Sahn Soen-sa’s explanation of death and the life-force to a child, then revisit Strand’s celebration of clouds and everything they mean."
"The Ironic, The Tragic Thing..."
“One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless… I have accepted the fact, hard as it may be, that human beings are inclined to behave in ways that would make animals blush. The ironic, the tragic thing is that we often behave in ignoble fashion from what we consider the highest motives. The animal makes no excuse for killing his prey; the human animal, on the other hand, can invoke God’s blessing when massacring his fellow men. He forgets that God is not on his side but at his side.”
“There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.”
- Henry Miller
"Forgiveness..."
"It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive."
- Gregory David Roberts, "Shantaram"
○
"A Buddhist Prayer of Forgiveness"
"If I have harmed anyone in any way
either knowingly or unknowingly
through my own confusions
I ask their forgiveness.
If anyone has harmed me in any way
either knowingly or unknowingly
through their own confusions
I forgive them.
And if there is a situation
I am not yet ready to forgive
I forgive myself for that.
For all the ways that I harm myself,
negate, doubt, belittle myself,
judge or be unkind to myself
through my own confusions
I forgive myself."
Jim Kunstler, "Repentance"
"Repentance"
By Jim Kunstler
“You must trust and believe in people
or life becomes impossible.”
- Anton Chekhov
"The doctors of this country - of all Western Civ, really - owe their citizens an apology and an explanation, and even then, they might not be able to save modern medicine. The doctors have dishonored and disgraced their profession. They promulgated a Covid- 19 vaccination program that is now clearly killing a lot of people early in life and unnaturally. To this day, no established professional group of doctors, or formal association, or major journal, has called for an end to the vaxx program.
The signal has been clear for the better part of a year. The mRNA products made by Pfizer and Moderna did not stop transmission of Covid-19 and were causing widespread harm, especially in the working-age population between 25 and 64 who were forced to take the shots to keep their jobs. For the whole population all-causes deaths and disabilities were still rising at the end of 2022.
The trend appeared to start with the unnatural deaths of professional athletes dropping dead on their playing fields. Then, in early 2022, life insurance companies issued reports that the death rates of policy-holders employed by companies with insurance plans were up 40 percent. The numbers were confirmed in mid-2022 by the Society of Actuaries - the professional org of people who actually parse the statistics that the insurance industry bases its business model on. In fact the number of excess deaths in younger age groups had grown dramatically - Covid vaccination produced a 78-percent increase in excess deaths among the 25-34 age group, a 100-percent increase in excess deaths among the 35-44 age group, and a 80-percent increase in excess deaths among the 45-54 age group.
These signals arrived special-delivery and gift-wrapped to the medical profession and, amazingly, no corresponding warning to the public came back out. The doctors continued to push the vaccines. The public health officials (many of them doctors) in all the agencies under the US Dept. of Health and Human Services withheld information about the harms that were being done and continued to run advertisements promoting the vaccines at the same time these officials must have noticed the alarming news incoming. As late as this new year, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky appeared in TV ads promoting mRNA booster shots.
In short, a professional class the public depends on to define reality have done everything possible to conceal and distort reality. The cable news networks and the newspapers amplified the distortions to prevent the public from understanding what was happening to them in an epic world health crisis. Social media, managed backstage by government intel agencies, reinforced the information blackout. The crisis was coming not so much from the Covid-19 virus itself, which had a death rate well under one percent of those infected; the crisis came from the supposed remedy for the virus, the vaccines pushed on the uninformed and misinformed citizens.
Outside a small circle of apostate doctors - Malone, McCullough, Kory, Cole, Risch, Bhattacharya, and others - the practicing physicians of America went blindly and stupidly along with the government’s vaccination program. My own primary care physician told me he was “a hundred percent confident in the vaccines” when he attempted to persuade me to take the shots. (I declined.) In the next year’s physical exam he didn’t even mention the vaccines. How about your doctors? Do you wonder what they’ve learned? Or if they’ve learned anything.
And what are they going to do now? Pretend that none of this is happening? Continue to demonize, discredit, and punish the few doctors who won’t pretend? My PC doc doubles as Chief Health Officer of his group practice. He’s fired doctors and others on the staff who refused to take the shots his company mandated. He’s dishonored his Hippocratic oath. He’s in mid-life with, one would assume ordinarily, many working years ahead of him. The information about vaccine deaths and disabilities is going to get worse, and his own behavior around the crisis is going to look worse, probably even to himself. There are hundreds of thousands of doctors like him. As of now, early 2023, there is no general movement among them to explain or apologize for their actions. What will happen?
I’ll tell you what will happen: medicine as we’ve known it is going to collapse, along with most other activities in our society. Apart from ethical offenses against the public in the single instance of the Covid-19 emergency, doctors and their administrative cohorts have stealthily surrendered to a racketeering business model that had already badly damaged the practice of medicine before Covid-19 came on the scene.
Remember: as a general principle, organisms and systems often assume their greatest size just before they go extinct or fail. That’s exactly what you’re seeing in the conglomeratization of hospitals in the USA. If the idea was to remove redundancies for the sake of “efficiency,” then they did exactly what destroys ecosystems. Anyway, the net effect of all that hospital consolidation was just to make access to health care much more difficult for the average citizen, and the only benefit was to make multi-millionaires of the executives who run the hospitals.
Then Covid-19 came along and they decimated their own workforce with vaccine mandates. Now, many hospitals can barely function, and many have had to shut down specific services. Quite a few hospitals are going bankrupt, which only feeds the predatory consolidation still ongoing. When the financial, banking, and insurance disorders ahead start to bite later this year, hospitals will be shutting down. In the meantime, a lot of people will lose their lives to the disastrous side-effects of the vaccines. It is already the case, that the vaccine-injured who seek help from the medical system are lied-to, mis-treated, or ignored. Some of these are the doctors themselves and other health professionals who collide with reality the hard way.
Something will emergently replace this monster we call “health care.” Maybe it will still think of itself medicine, but it will operate at a much smaller scale, minus a lot of the expensive and rather miraculous high-tech developed in our time, but also minus a lot of hazardous high-tech interventions, especially pharmaceuticals, that were used as revenue streams despite the adverse blowbacks they induced.
Will the doctors recover the trust of the public? It’s going to be a slog for them. They’ll have a long way to go just to recover their own honor and self-respect. Some sort of organized act of apology and repentance will have to happen first."
o
"The more I see of the monied medical classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
"For The Most Part..."
"Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion."
- Michael Crichton, "The Lost World"
"11 Signs That The Economic 'Tipping Point' That Everyone Has Been Waiting For Has Now Arrived"
"11 Signs That The Economic 'Tipping Point'
That Everyone Has Been Waiting For Has Now Arrived"
By Michael Snyder
"How bad do things have to get before people start realizing that we are in the midst of a full-blown economic crisis? The “experts” on television are endlessly debating about whether or not we are going to have a “recession” this year, and meanwhile economic activity is imploding all around us. The number of homes being sold in this country each month has already fallen by a third. The number of job cuts in November was 417 percent higher than it was during the same month a year earlier, and at this point even Amazon is laying off thousands of workers. The Federal Reserve has declared war on inflation, but prices continue to spiral out of control. In fact, vegetables are 80 percent more expensive now than they were 12 months ago. Meanwhile, the financial markets continue to plunge. A third of the value of the Nasdaq has already been wiped out, and more than two-thirds of the value of all cryptocurrencies is already gone.
After everything that has already transpired, everyone should be able to clearly understand what is happening. So many people have been waiting for an economic nightmare to come, but the truth is that it is already here. The following are 11 signs that the economic “tipping point” that everyone has been waiting for has now arrived…
#1 U.S. manufacturing is declining at the fastest pace that we have seen since the early days of the COVID pandemic…"The S&P Global U.S. Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell at the fastest rate since May 2020 in December, a continuing sign that the manufacturing sector is on the decline, S&P Global reported Tuesday.
The U.S. Manufacturing PMI posted a 46.2 in December, down from 47.7 in November and solidly below 50, which signals that the sector is contracting, according to S&P Global. Production levels contracted in back-to-back months, with new sales plummeting at the end of December at the fastest pace since 2007, as companies cited weakening demand amid “economic uncertainty” and inflation weighing on customers."
#2 U.S. services PMI has now fallen for six months in a row.
#3 We just witnessed the largest one day drop in the Baltic Dry Index since 1984…"The Baltic Exchange’s dry bulk sea freight index crashed on Tuesday in the worst decline on record, sinking on prospects of a global recession. Baltic Dry Good Index is a measure of global shipping and economic health. The overall index, which tracks rates for capesize, panamax, and supramax shipping vessels carrying dry bulk commodities, plunged 17.5% to $1,250, the most significant daily decline since 1984."
#4 Thanks to rapidly falling imports, we just witnessed the largest monthly decline in the trade deficit since the last financial crisis…"According to the BEA, the November trade deficit narrowed to $61.5b from $77.8b in prior month, coming in below the median estimate of $63.0BN (and just barely missing the top end of the range of $61.3BN to $80.5BN from 42 economists). Remarkably, the 20% one-month decline in the deficit was the single biggest drop in the US trade deficit on a percentage basis going back to the global financial crisis!"
#5 In 2022, U.S. auto sales were the lowest that we have seen for a full year in more than a decade…"Industrywide, U.S. auto sales totaled 13.7 million vehicles in 2022, the lowest figure since 2011 and an 8% decrease from the prior year, according to the research firm Wards Intelligence. Sales had topped 17 million vehicles for five straight years before the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, unleashing supply-chain problems that have bogged down deliveries ever since."
#6 The average rate on a 30 year fixed-rate mortgage is more than twice as high as it was this time last year…"Mortgage rates inched up again last week, after a slight increase the week before interrupted six straight weeks of falling rates. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.48% in the week ending January 5, up from 6.42% the week before, according to Freddie Mac. A year ago, the 30-year fixed rate was 3.22%."
#7 According to CNN, sales of apartments in Manhattan were 28.5 percent lower in the fourth quarter of 2022 than they were in the fourth quarter of 2021…"Higher rates and still-high housing prices cooled demand at the end of last year, causing sales to tumble. Sales dropped 28.5% in the fourth quarter compared to the fourth quarter of 2021."
#8 Overall, existing home sales in the United States have fallen for 10 months in a row and are now down by more than a third since January 2022.
#9 Bed Bath & Beyond is warning that the company is literally on the verge of declaring bankruptcy…"Bed Bath & Beyond warned Thursday it’s running out of cash and is considering bankruptcy. The retailer, citing worse-than-expected sales, issued a “going concern” warning that in the upcoming months it likely will not have the cash to cover expenses, such as lease agreements or payments to suppliers. Bed Bath said it is exploring financial options, such as restructuring, seeking additional capital or selling assets, in addition to a potential bankruptcy."
#10 It is being reported that Amazon has decided to lay off approximately 18,000 employees…"Amazon.com Inc. is laying off more than 18,000 employees — the biggest reduction in its history — in the latest sign that a tech-industry slump is deepening."
#11 Overall, the tech industry has already laid off more than 150,000 workers over the last year.
Many more American workers will lose their jobs as economic activity slows down even more throughout 2023. So if you currently have a good job that you value, try to cling to it as hard as you can.
The times that we are moving into are going to look completely different from the times that we have enjoyed over the past decade. Our leaders were able to keep the party going for a long time by absolutely flooding the system with money, but now they have lost control. We are literally careening toward disaster, but most Americans still don’t understand what is taking place.
Most Americans just assume that those in authority know exactly what they are doing and that a “return to normal” is inevitable. I wish that was true, because the ride into the economic abyss that we are facing is not going to be fun."
o
Related:
"Something Like Reverence..."
"When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair."
- Blaise Pascal
Ahh, but it does...
○
“When the pain of leaving behind what we know outweighs the pain of embracing it, or when the power we face is overwhelming and neither flight nor fight will save us, there may be salvation in sitting still. And if salvation is impossible, then at least before perishing we may gain a clearer vision of where we are. By sitting still I do not mean the paralysis of dread, like that of a rabbit frozen beneath the dive of a hawk. I mean something like reverence, a respectful waiting, a deep attentiveness to forces much greater than our own.”
- Scott Russell Sanders
Folks, I fear our time for such reverence has arrived.
God help us, God help us all...
"Time and Stuff"
"Time and Stuff"
Limiting factors to the promised cornucopia.
By Bill Bonner and Joel Bowman
"Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime."
~ Andrew Marvell
Normandy, France - "An epiphany! We are in a farmhouse…looking out at the ‘cour,’ which is an area in grass and apple trees, boxed in by barns and other farm buildings. The buildings are not in bad shape. None are falling down. But all need work. Physical work. Work done by people in work clothes.
One has a roof in need of repair. Another needs a new roof altogether. New doors for one of the storage sheds are on order. And there is a little abandoned cottage, which has been recycled from a bakery…with its classic dome-shaped oven…into a pigsty…and then into living quarters. Today, it is a wreck…in need of total renovation.
All of these things require materials…skills…and time – the kind of things you find in the ‘old economy.’ They are things that produce more GDP…and make us wealthier. When the work is done, we will have better facilities…a better view from the farmhouse…and maybe even get more production (GDP) from a more efficient farm.
Had we world enough and time, we could spend all day on the internet…and squander as much wealth as we want – in ‘wars of choice,’ in bailouts of bankers, investors or students…invested in companies that can never earn enough to justify the capital…or given away, either to the rich (contracts, jobs, grants, boosting stock prices, low interest rates ) or to the poor (food stamps, unemployment comp, ‘disability,’ rent support). But in the world we live in, time and stuff are limited. And when they are wasted…they are gone forever.
Choke Chains: By contrast, we open up our laptop. We are immediately in a different world, without apparent limits. We can go as deep as we want. We can find out about the entertainer “Boo” and how she died last week. Or, we can learn how to decline a Latin noun. Or, we can dig into the debate over selling scrap iron to Japan before WWII (it was used to make ships, planes and bullets).
And yet…even on the internet, the dogs race out with loud barks and growls. But they eventually reach the end of the chain. Earlier this week, Dan told us about five companies that got choked: "…eight stocks that lost a combined $5 trillion in market value – Tesla (down 65%), Meta (down 64%), Netflix (down 51%), Nvidia (down 50%), Amazon (down 49%), Google (down 38%), Microsoft (down 28.9%), and Apple (down 27%)."
And let’s not forget Salesforce. The stock was at $300 in November 2021. Now, it’s $130. Salesforce is located in a sleek San Francisco business tower. It provides software to other tech companies to help them handle customers. But when the customers went away, so did Salesforce’s sales…net income fell from over $4 billion in 2021 to less than $1.5 billion in the most recent 12 months.
Salesforce is a special case – combining the illusions of the dot.com era with the conceits of Jack Welch-style roll-up madness. CEO and founder, Marc Benioff, followed much the same playbook as Welch at GE…buying companies left and right in order to increase his own sales.
Fantasy Worlds: It’s hard enough to figure out one business. Trying to understand and digest dozens of other businesses is hopeless. And last year, all of these ‘tech’ companies ran into the brick wall that separates the real world of time and stuff…from the fantasy world of Zuckerberg, crypto and federal finances.
Meta, and Google, for example, are advertising-driven media. Their revenues grew as they took ad spending away from traditional media. But ad budgets are always limited by sales…and sales are always limited by incomes…and incomes are always limited by time. Shoppers earn their money by selling their time, by the hour. They can’t get more hours. So, their incomes are limited by the amount of stuff they produce/hour. And that, too – productivity – is going down at the fastest rate in 40 years. CNBC:
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently made waves when he told employees in a Slack message that the company’s newest hires aren’t being productive enough, and he wanted help figuring out why. The tech giant’s employee productivity issue is not an isolated one.
The most powerful organization on the planet, the US government, ‘prints’ our money. But even it is on a chain. It can print all it wants, but ultimately, all wealth comes from taxpayers…and taxpayers live in the real world of time and stuff. The feds can try to by-pass the taxpayers; they can just ‘print’ money to pay their bills. But then, people just get less stuff for their money.
Coy Mistresses: We were suspicious of the ‘information revolution’ right from the beginning. It was said, in the 1990s, that ‘information will replace capital.’ Investors thought they had discovered a new source of wealth. They could buy a dogecoin…an NFT…or something ‘on the blockchain.’ And somehow this new, unchained economy would make them rich. That is, people thought time and stuff no longer mattered; our mistress could be coy as long as she wanted. The infinite-ness of the electronic media would make it vastly easier and faster for us to get what we wanted.
Theoretically, the peasant in Borneo, laboring with a steel-tipped hoe, was more or less confined to his lot. But now, with the worldwide web at his fingertips, he would see that he could till the land better with a four-wheel-drive John Deere tractor. He would then greatly improve his productivity…food prices would fall…and we’d all be better off.
But wait. Where was the tractor? Didn’t it still have to be made – with capital, steel, skill and time? And didn’t the manufacturers still have to wonder how much purchasing power the Borneo peasant actually had? And wasn’t it just as likely that the Borneo peasant – knowing he couldn’t afford a John Deere tractor – spent his time on the internet gambling on meme stocks, reading dumb opinions, or looking at dirty pictures of white women in Dusseldorf?
On the evidence, America’s new technology – led by Amazon, Facebook, Google and countless others – has actually slowed the output of stuff. GDP growth rates were in the 3% range in the 1990s. Now, they’re close to zero, after falling gradually and suddenly for the whole 21st century.
What to make of this? We don’t know yet. Stay tuned…"
o
Joel’s Note: "Back in the real world, meanwhile, more signs of the times. Our friend Chris Mayer sent over this chart, from Bloomberg, this morning…
"As of this morning (5 January '23),” reads the accompanying article, “Bloomberg data now shows no negative yielding debt globally for the first time since 2014. 2 years ago we had $18.4tn globally and over 4000 bonds with a negative yield."
What does that mean, exactly? Up, up… and away? “Central banks are not letting interest rates rise because they want to,” as Bill pointed out earlier this week, “but because they have to.”
In other words, the market is forcing the Fed’s hand. As you’ve no doubt seen for yourself, inflation remains stubbornly “non-transitory” across much of the developed world. Central banks have to be seen to be “doing something” to ease the pain for consumers, workers and voters. Ergo, rising rates…which may remain “higher for longer” than people expect.
The Fed reiterated its own position during its meeting in December. A couple of key quotes from the minutes, brought to our attention by BPR macro analyst and the man who assiduously combs through such docs, Dan Denning...
“No participants anticipated that it would be appropriate to begin reducing the federal funds rate target in 2023. In view of the persistent and unacceptably high level of inflation, several participants commented that historical experience cautioned against prematurely loosening monetary policy.”
~ From FOMC’s December meeting, 2022.
Reckoned Dan in Friday’s research note to BPR members…"Inflation would have to come down a lot—and stay down–for the Fed to cut rates or print money again in 2023. Unless there’s a major ‘credit event’ (a sovereign default, a major and unexpected corporate bankruptcy, or a crisis at a systematically important bank), the Fed’s target rate may go even higher (closer to 5.5%). Which means stocks not yet priced for higher rates (and with lower earnings on the horizon from a 2023 recession) have further to fall.
To recap…Rates: higher for longer. Stocks: further to fall."
"How It, And We, Have Completely Lost Our Minds And Really Are!"
Full screen recommended!
Hi-Rez, "2+2=5"
"The whole world goin' mad, bruh..."
"Going?" Oh, we're there, bruh, we're there...
"Strange Prices At Kroger! Stock Up On These Deals! What's Coming!?"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 1/6/23:
"Strange Prices At Kroger!
Stock Up On These Deals! What's Coming!?"
"In today's vlog we are at Kroger, and are noticing very strange price increases on groceries! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and the empty shelves situation! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Comments here:
"They Are Going To Control You"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 1/6/23:
"They Are Going To Control You"
"We’re at the consumer-electronics shelf for the first day. Take a look at all the autonomous vehicles and the innovation with the EV batteries."
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "Fact: Major Banks Are In Serious Trouble. And This Is What You Are Not Supposed To Know"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/6/23:
"Fact: Major Banks Are In Serious Trouble.
And This Is What You Are Not Supposed To Know"
Comments here:
Thursday, January 5, 2023
"Ukraine – The Big Push To End The War" (Excerpt)
"Ukraine –
The Big Push To End The War" (Excerpt)
by Moon of Alabama
Excerpt: "Over Christmas I had a short talk with a relative about the war in Ukraine. He asked me who would win and was astonished when I said: “Ukraine has zero chance to win.” That person reads some German mainstream news sites and watches the public TV networks. With those sources of ‘information’ he was made to believe that Ukraine was winning the war.
One may excuse that with him never having been in a military and not being politically engaged. But still there are some basic numbers that let one conclude from the beginning that Russia, the much bigger, richer and more industrialized country, had clearly all advantages. My relative obviously never had had that thought.
The ‘western’ propaganda is still quite strong. However, as I pointed out in March last year propaganda does not change a war and lies do not win it. It's believability is shrinking.
Former Lt.Col. Alex Vershinin, who in June pointed out that industrial warfare is back and the ‘West’ was not ready to wage it, has a new recommendable piece out which analyses the tactics on both sides, looks ahead and concludes that Russia will almost certainly win the war:
Wars of attrition are won through careful husbandry of one’s own resources while destroying the enemy’s. Russia entered the war with vast materiel superiority and a greater industrial base to sustain and replace losses. They have carefully preserved their resources, withdrawing every time the tactical situation turned against them. Ukraine started the war with a smaller resource pool and relied on the Western coalition to sustain its war effort. This dependency pressured Ukraine into a series of tactically successful offensives, which consumed strategic resources that Ukraine will struggle to replace in full, in my view. The real question isn’t whether Ukraine can regain all its territory, but whether it can inflict sufficient losses on Russian mobilized reservists to undermine Russia’s domestic unity, forcing it to the negotiation table on Ukrainian terms, or will Russian’ attrition strategy work to annex an even larger portion of Ukraine.
Russian domestic unity has only grown over the war. As Gilbert Doctorow points out wars make nations. The war does not only unite certain nationalistic parts of Ukraine who still dream of retaking Crimea. It also unites all of Russia. Unlike Ukraine Russia will be strengthened by it."
Full, highly recommended, article here:
"Country's Dire Warning: 'Stockpile 20 Months Worth of Food'"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper 1/5/23:
"Country's Dire Warning:
'Stockpile 20 Months Worth of Food'"
"Countries are hoarding supplies for 2 years of hell,
'white lung and wild variant is spreading'"
Comments here:
"The Pain Is Getting Worse; Inflationary Depression Unavoidable; Markets In For A Rude Awakening
Jeremiah Babe, 1/5/23:
"The Pain Is Getting Worse; Inflationary Depression Unavoidable;
Markets In For A Rude Awakening
Comments here:
"20 Food Products Getting More Expensive In The Months Ahead"
Full screen recommended.
"20 Food Products Getting More
Expensive In The Months Ahead"
By Epic Economist
"We've just gone through a year of record food inflation, and now we're being told to brace for further price increases at the grocery stores as retailers and manufacturers cope with a series of challenges that go from reduced supplies to higher transportation costs to explosive commodity costs. In fact, the latest Food Price Report released on Monday estimates that food prices will see a 7% increase on top of the 10.4% growth seen over the past twelve months. That will add hundreds or even thousands of dollars to the average family’s annual expenses, says Samantha Taylor, one of the researchers behind the report.
“Living is expensive, and we are not bringing good news,” Taylor stresses. The report projects that price hikes will occur across all food categories. Researchers noted that the typical American family of four is oing to be forced to shell out an average of $16,288 on food over the course of 2023 - an increase of $1,065 from this year. A two-adult household will spend $7,711, a jump of more than $500 from 2022.
Consumers are starting to notice that even cheaper meat options are facing some disturbing price increases lately. Tyson Foods, Conagra, and other meat processors have actually notified their retail customers in recent weeks that they will hike prices in January for frozen and refrigerated meats. Some of the products that will see increases include Ball Park hot dogs and burgers, State Fair corn dogs, Jimmy Dean frozen breakfast, Hillshire Farm sausage, and lunch meat, and Hebrew National and Oscar Mayer hot dogs, according to supplier letters to wholesale customers viewed by CNN Business. "All the packaged meat suppliers are coming to the price increase party," said one industry insider who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their company's relationship with suppliers. The price increases will range from 10.9% to 12.6%, CNN reports.
Soaring chicken prices are also making consumers turn to cheaper options, and chicken nuggets have become a staple in many households. Sales have grown by 50% in the third quarter of 2022. But, unfortunately, a shrinking chicken flock and competition with restaurants and fast-food chains are making the price of this consumer favorite jump by 10.9%, and further increases are expected later this year as supplies continue to contract. Even major chains like Burger King are suffering from those price swings. A few months back, the chain announced that it was going to reduce the number of nuggets in meals from ten pieces to 8, and also that consumers would have to pay more to get them. Similarly, Yogurt king Danone just revealed plans of hiking prices over the next couple of months, and other food makers are likely to follow suit. A smaller national cow herd is driving milk production to the lowest levels in almost a decade. Consequently, manufacturers competing over the available supply and that competition is also contributing to a spike in prices. After rising by nearly 14% over the past 12 months, yogurt prices can see another 9% to 11% increase in the first half of 2023.
We hope you have prepared for the grocery shortages and “price readjustments,” companies and retailers have been warning about. But if you didn’t, it’s not too late if you start now. With all that said, we decided to list some of the items that will be seeing price spikes in the next few weeks and months."
Gerald Celente, "Middle East Meltdown; Office Building Bust; Be Prepared"
Full screen recommended.
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, Trends Journal 1/5/23:
"Middle East Meltdown; Office Building Bust; Be Prepared"
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "The Potential For A Massive Stock Market Drop Is Rising. Keep Your Eyes On This!"
Your guide...
Gregory Mannarino, PM 1/5/23:
"The Potential For A Massive Stock Market Drop
Is Rising. Keep Your Eyes On This!"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Runrig, "Running to the Light"
Full screen recommended.
Runrig, "Running to the Light"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“About 70 million light-years distant, gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 289 is larger than our own Milky Way. Seen nearly face-on, its bright core and colorful central disk give way to remarkably faint, bluish spiral arms. The extensive arms sweep well over 100 thousand light-years from the galaxy's center.
At the lower right in this sharp, telescopic galaxy portrait the main spiral arm seems to encounter a small, fuzzy elliptical companion galaxy interacting with enormous NGC 289. Of course spiky stars are in the foreground of the scene. They lie within the Milky Way toward the southern constellation Sculptor.”
Chet Raymo, “Take My Arm”
“Take My Arm”
by Chet Raymo
“I’m sure I have referenced here before the poems of Grace Schulman, she who inhabits that sweet melancholy place between “the necessity and impossibility of belief.” Between, too, the necessity and impossibility of love.
Belief and love. They have so much in common, yet are as distinct as self and other. How strange that two people can hitch their lives together, on a whim, say, or wild intuition, knowing little if nothing about the other’s hiddenness, about things that even the other does not fully understand and couldn’t articulate even if he did. Blind, deaf, dumb, they leap into the future, hoping to fly, and, for a moment, soaring, like Icarus, sunward. The necessity of wax. The impossibility of wax. We “fall” in love, they say. Schulman: “We slog. We tramp the road of possibility. Give me your arm.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)